Call for community-based care of mental patients….Anuradha Mascarenhas
Medical researchers have made a push for greater focus on the care of people with mental, neurological and substance-use (MNS) disorders, calling for community-based services and integration of packages for such people in routine primary health care.
A Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health initiative has identified priorities for research in the next 10 years for people with such disorders. Published online on July 7 in Nature, the priorities have been identified by a consortium of over 500 researchers, advocates and clinicians.
The countrys mental health policy needs to be based along these guidelines, said Dr Vikram Patel, co-chair of the scientific advisory committee for the initiative. Dr Patel is a scientist on the task force of the national mental health programme. Based in Goa, where he has founded the NGO Sangnath that provides interventions for the mentally ill, Dr Patel is also professor, Centre for Global Mental Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Given its contribution to the global burden of disease, mental illness receives nowhere near the kind of attention and resources it deserves, Patel said.
Compared with incidence, India has few beds for mental health patients and is short of professionals too (see box), says psychiatrist Dr Soumitra Pathare.
The list of global challenges was eventually narrowed down to 25 and Dr Patel listed five of them as important, to be followed in the Indian national mental health policy programme integrate screening and core packages of services into routine primary health care; reduce the cost and improve the supply of effective medications; provide effective and affordable community-based care and rehabilitation; improve childrens access to evidence-based care by trained health providers in low- and middle-income countries; strengthen the mental-health component in training of all health care personnel.
The initiative was the first priority-setting exercise for mental health to employ the Delphi method, which uses controlled feedback to arrive at a consensus within a dispersed panel of many participants. It covered the full range of MNS disorders. The study was funded by the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland, and supported by the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD), headquartered in London.
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/call-for-communitybased-care-of-mental-patients/816045/0